Tuesday, February 26, 2013

For the Improving Player

This blog is for b-teamers. Specifically, for b-teamers who
want to be a-teamers.

I am particularly well suited to write about this goal
because when I started I was the worst player on the C-team and eventually
played on the A-team during a season heavy with veteran talent and with a max
roster. During my four years at Illinois I learned a lot about improving at
ultimate, both the technical skills and as an athlete.

There are a million facets to improving at any sport or game
and if you are lucky you have friends with whom you talk about these things on
a daily basis. I was fortunate enough to have several people who fit this
description. I am confident that if I had gone to a school where I did not meet
these friends I would never have made as much improvement.

The majority of this post will be a list of topics I have
discussed with someone else and the conclusions that have been drawn that are
either a) counter-intuitive or b) extremely important in my judgment. If I were
actually able to get all of my thoughts about ultimate written down it would
probably be 500 pages long and full of speculation. I will attempt to limit
this to only the things I feel the most strongly about and things which are not
esoteric. If I did not impose this limit it would include things like ‘good
players go after second chance discs like it’s the first chance’.*

*Many of these now included in post script.

Getting Better

How much can a player improve in one year? I was in the
unique position of being a terrible athlete and having terrible disc skills as
a rookie. I tried very hard to improve both of these throughout all four years
with varying success.

In general I think a player can expect to move one rung up
the continuum each year with significant dedication. If both disc skills and
athleticism are granted a grade between B- and A+, where B- is a bad b-team
player and A+ is an all-region A-team player, you can go from B- to B or B+ to
A- given one full year of play and practice. Where this actually places you in
terms of the team isn’t an exact science. In many scenarios an “A” athletic
player with “B-“ disc skills has been used as a defensive specialist on the
A-team to great effect.

In practice, however, we see many players stalling
athletically at A- or A and skills-wise around B+ or A-. This has led to a
poisonous assumption that people have reached their ability ceilings. I have
theories about why they both happen.

Athletically is the most interesting, so I’ll start there.
It is very easy to maintain one’s athleticism when one is between the ages of
18-22. You can party five nights a week and eat mostly sugar and maintain your
level of athleticism. This goes for if you are a B- or an A+. You have heard of
the great players who drink mostly soda and eat mostly candy. If you are trying
to reach their level this can be confusing, discouraging, or anything in
between. Most of the players who fit this mold played sports at a high level in
high school, and have logged more hours of workouts during those four years
than you will be able to make up in the next four. If you have any hope of
catching them you will have to be extremely dedicated and you will have to
forego some things that they will enjoy. It is up to you to figure out if that
is worth it. If they are not working as hard as you they will hit a plateau,
and you will keep improving. The important thing to note about this is that
improvement is extremely difficult, while maintaining is extremely easy. If you
become lazy it is an extremely abrupt fall from improvement into maintenance,
and that is not a good thing.

Because an A athlete is already dominating most of his
matchups with ease, and because he doesn’t run into A+ players very often he
will almost always fail to reach A+. Look around, there are probably 5 players
demonstrating this on any high level team during any given year. This explains
a great part of the disparity in the athletic quality between Ultimate and NCAA
sports*. This seems like a bad thing at first, but it means that a player
doesn’t have to have been a star athlete in high school to compete in college.

*The other great explainer is that NCAA athletes are usually
genetically predisposed to athleticism and are taller, but since you won’t be
playing against any of them this isn’t something you should give much thought.

Skills plateaus are also interesting, and people fail for
essentially the same reason. They simply don’t realize how hard you have to
work to improve a skill. In my experience it takes about a year of practice to
add a throw to your game, from non-existent to game-ready. A throw is not a
broad term. An invert-forehand is a throw, a short hammer is a throw, and
backhand is not a throw. People wonder why they can’t throw a huck like
Kennedy, but the answer is staring them in the face. Kennedy has thrown thousands
of more hucks in the last four years than almost every player to come through
Illinois. He has stayed after practice to work on throws more than you have
thrown on the quad or with your friends in frat park combined. It isn’t close.
The number of repetitions you are shooting for to improve a throw is going to
be in the thousands. Once you accept the scope of this challenge you can begin
attacking it appropriately. Tons of people recognize this and there are some D3
schools who demand each player carries a disc in their backpack at all times.
That’s a dumb rule, but if you aren’t throwing almost every day you are
probably not going to impress people with your throws.

It has often been said by very good throwers that throwing
on the quad in sneakers is not helpful. To an extent they are right. The
difference between a focused throwing session with a goal and cleats is night
and day to throwing with a buddy on the quad. But getting in 300 extra throws
between classes each week is also an order of magnitude better than doing
nothing between practices.

As an aside, your throws are worse than you think they are.
This is because the people marking you 95% of the time are either garbage at
marking or aren’t trying. When the game is on the line you will be playing
against someone trying really hard to take away your best throw. Despite my own
best efforts I have only one throw that I have complete confidence in with wind
in my face and a strong mark, and I worked pretty hard on a lot of throws.

Play Time

Play time often seems like it’s out of your control, and to
a certain extent it is. Reps during scrimmages are often determined largely by
who wants to play, and who doesn’t step off the field. In that regard you can
get almost as much as you want of the next best thing. Practice reps are also a
great place to give newly acquired skills some use. The best place to develop a
skill is during drills, once you start to gain confidence they can be used in
practice against your own team, and then when you start to see openings in
games you will be ready to use them.

The rest of this section is specific to b-team play time.

If you are getting limited play time, i.e. <5 points per game, you should
attempt to gain as much as possible from each one. Everything you do should have
100% of your focus, and setting small attainable goals such as three layouts
per day or 100% completion on dumps/swings for a day are useful. You will still
be getting the bulk of your improvement from drills and scrimmages. Utilize
them as much as you can.

If you are one of the main players on the team and are getting significant
playing time you have more flexibility. You will have tons of scenarios and
should use every one of them to your advantage. You will play against teams
that are much worse than you are and can learn to exploit mistakes ruthlessly.
This is an ability that will serve you well when you play at a higher level.
The people you will play then won’t make as many mistakes, but they will almost
all make some, and it will be your ability to take full advantage of mistakes
that makes you a valuable player, rather than your ability to simply beat them
at their strengths. Along the same lines you will want to play as flawlessly as
you can on defense and without the disc on offense. Even if they are not taking
advantage of your mistakes you need to be conscious of them. It is very hard to
discern these yourself, so you need to find someone whose opinion you trust and
ask them for feedback often. There will be a ton of people willing to talk to
you about ultimate, but only a few will have worthwhile feedback. Identify them
and milk them for all they are worth. They will become your best friends.

If you are one of the lucky players playing near 50% of the points you have a
golden opportunity to build tournament stamina. I can’t find the quote, but I’m
pretty sure it was Stupca who said that the only way to build tournament
stamina is by playing them, and he is right. There will be moments where you
are tired from your bookends on the last point and now with the game tied 11-11
you’re still in. This is the opportunity to take over the game with your will.
Instead of easing off the gas pedal you should be stepping on it. When you are
one of the main players for the B-team you can be sure there are ten other guys
who would love to be on the field in your place. Even if your 70% is better
than their 110% you would be doing yourself and your team a disservice to not
take advantage of the situation to better yourself and play for your teammates.

People’s Perception

If you are working very hard to improve, chances are you are
improving each month about as much as your teammates are each semester.* It
takes a long time for people to notice you’ve gotten better. This has several
causes. Because people have seen that most players are largely stagnant and are
probably stagnant in their own development they assume you are as well. Until
the improvements become enormous they are very easy to miss. This effect
becomes very pronounced when you are nearing and passing those of your
teammates. It is in the nature of people to think they are slightly better than
average, and this will blind people from seeing that you are approaching or
surpassing them in ability or athleticism. In the long run this will not
matter, and that is pretty much the idea you must console yourself with.

*I previously said most people are stagnant, but there is a
general rate of improvement that everybody has just from being around ultimate
for 12 hours a week. It comes from a mostly passive absorption of knowledge and
learning of one’s own strengths and weaknesses and how to compensate.

Skill Improvement

There are only twenty or thirty programs in the country with
as much raw skill and ability as Illinois. This means that you don’t have to search
youtube to figure out how to pick up a skill. There is almost certainly going
to be someone on the team who has mastered the skill you are looking to gain.

You should identify the best one or two players on the team
when it comes to the skill you want and ask them about it. If you are still
having a hard time make them hang out with you and video tape the whole thing
so you can go over it later.

Once you know what you should be doing, you have to practice
it until it is easy. If you can’t figure out a drill to work on it ask someone
smart.

Work on a good mark first. Almost nobody in ultimate
actively works on their mark anything like as much as they work on any other
facet of the game, and by having a good mark you will be immediately valuable.
And a player with a bad mark is pretty much useless despite other skills.

The next most valuable tool is a short-range throw, one
forehand and one backhand. It can be any release point, any curve, and executed
with any fake. It should work in windy conditions and against a high quality
mark.

Making cuts offensively and playing defense against them
requires a blend between skill and athleticism. Copy someone whose style you
like. Ask them how to defend an upline. Ask someone else how to get open
breakside. Ask a third person how to give and go. Stealing all the moves you
like the best won’t make you a copy, it will give you your own distinct style.

Athletic Improvement
Specifics

Most of the rest of this post will be devoted to more
specific ideas about improving athletically. I do not think I am in error to
say that I have improved as much or more than any other player in the program
over the last four years athletically.

The most important factor to improving athletically is time in the gym. It
seems obvious on its face, but many people will spend an inordinate amount of
time researching fitness and not enough actually becoming fit. You can more
easily read about working out for 20 hours per week than you can actually work
out that much, but it is important to come close to your maximum useful workout
hours and then make them more efficient by learning than it is to come up with
the perfect workout scheme before ever starting.

If you wonder what the most time a person can gainfully workout for in a week I
would suggest looking to the schedule of NCAA athletes. They probably log about
3 hours of workouts about 6 days per week. With that being said, I personally
find that 3 days of lifting for 30-50 minutes and 2 days of track workouts are
about the optimal range in addition to whatever full-team practices are going
on. Obviously the demands of tournaments must be taken into consideration, but
a player on the b-team will likely be less affected than a player on the a-team
by tournament disruptions.

Hitting the Gym

The most common question asked by rookies is about which
lifts they should do. The best answers are always short and unsexy. People have
an innate desire for a lifting plan that looks like a menu at a restaurant. Two
pages full of notes about weights and reps and machine names.

The first two exercises are easy. Each player should be back-squatting and
deadlifting. There should be upper-body exercises with free weights that address
weaknesses. There should be single-leg exercises like split-squats and lunges. Having
more than six exercises means you are likely wasting time. There are probably
no machines that would benefit you more than a comparable free weight exercise.

As far as specific sets/reps, general advice is best. Warmup
sets are your friend. Do as many as you can make yourself do. I define warmup
as anything below 60% of your “working weight”. If you plan to finish squats
with a set of 200lbs anything below 120 is a warmup. Do the bar, 95lbs, and
115lbs. For working sets you should be doing between 15-30 reps total. 3x10?
Fine. 3x5? Fine. 5x5? Fine. 4x7? Fine. Each scheme has its uses, ask someone
who knows what he is doing for help to pick your own routine.

Your two goals in the gym should be gaining power and
gaining mobility. Mobility is not flexibility. Mobility is your ability to move
through natural ranges of motion and does not isolate single joints. To learn
more watch the early videos from this youtube channel (this resource is a 10): http://www.youtube.com/user/sanfranciscocrossfit

Once you have a routine in place you will no doubt start to
research ways to improve it. In this regard you will have to learn how to
search effectively. Google is your friend, but terrible advice is everywhere.
Similar to finding people who can tell you what you are doing wrong on the
field, it is important to find people who know what they are talking about when
it comes to working out.On a scale of
1-10, livestrong.com would score a 1. I would take advice from yahoo answers
before I took an article on livestrong seriously. Tim Morrill is a 7. He has
taken strides to improve himself and I expect him to further improve, but there
are better sources. Learn how to search a database like pubmed. Learn how to
interpret study results.

Foam rolling is great. It is not a panacea. It is a tool to
stay healthy, it will not heal your injuries. It is a great weapon against many
chronic use injuries like shin splints.

Supplements

People spend a lot of time working on their calves because
they think it will help them jump higher. Calves produce about 6% of the force
used to jump. Improving your calf strength twofold is less useful than
increasing your hamstring strength by 25%. Similarly, people spend a lot of
time worrying about which supplements to take rather than looking at their diet
as a whole.

Ultimate players and society in general don’t eat very well. If you are serious
about working out there is no reason you shouldn’t be consuming your weight
(lbs) in protein (g) or at least 75% of that number. E.g if you weigh 150lbs
you should be getting at least 150x.75g = 112g of protein every day. I suspect
most ultimate players are closer to 40%. This brings us to the most useful
supplement. Whey protein. Drink it with water if you’re overweight, drink it
with whole milk if you’re underweight, doesn’t matter. It is the easiest way to
get from 40% to 75%. I buy mine here: http://www.smartpowders.com/whey-protein-5lb-chocolate.html
It is cheaper than ON Whey, tastes and mixes better.

The only other supplements I would suggest are Vitamin D3
and creatine. If you do enough research on creatine that you can explain to
your mother why it isn’t a steroid and how it works you can decide if it is
worth taking or not.

Track Workouts

Track workouts should be <1.5 hours long. There should be a
warmup of generous distance, 1000m seems right. The rest of the workout should
be between 1600-3200m of total distance. 100m x16 is a lot of running, so is
400m x6. Use longer rest if you want to work your legs harder and shorter rest
if you want to work your heart’s aerobic capacity. If you think the workouts
you come up with are better than the ones people are currently doing then start
your own group.

Work on your form.

Running makes you better at running.

Concluding Thoughts

Playing ultimate was far and away the most rewarding
experience of my college years. It wouldn’t have been nearly as fun without the
struggle shared between myself and my teammates to improve. Whether it was
lifting at CRCE with Papa Bear and Steve Haake freshman year before we had a
clue what was going on, having competitions with Kennedy, throwing with Brad at every opportunity, moving
heavy weights with Bruns in the basement of the ARC, or being marked by Walden,
the entire experience of improving was worthwhile. When you are done playing
you will wish you did more to improve. The only part you can control is the
degree to which you feel that way. Everyone leaves something on the table, but
that means you can always try harder, not that you shouldn’t try at all.

Post Script

The first players down on the
pull are often not the fastest players.

Good teams have 4-7 people who
love ultimate, great teams have 10-15.

Having a great puller is worth
more points per game than almost anything else. It is like having a great
kicker in football.

If you watch club nationals
footage and think you are just a little below their level you need to re-evaluate
yourself and probably start watching at .5x speed to appreciate what you are
seeing.

If you want to get better faster
than your teammates, play club in the summer. It is only 4 months, but you will
gain an entire season of experience that they will not.

Good players go after second
chance discs like it is the first chance.

Frisbees float for a long time,
timing and point of attack are more important than height jumped.

Most great players try 100% 95%
of the time. Most good players try 100% 50% of the time.

Having a signature move is a
great thing, not a bad one.

Having a high completion
percentage on dump throws and catches is the layup of ultimate.

If there is a hospital disc pile
setting up and you aren’t your team’s best jumper, play for the tip.

There is a lag between working
out and feeling/seeing the results. I think it’s about 15 days.

Every time a great player
graduates you will regret not having learned their signature move from them.

It is much harder to have a bad
throw to open space than to a tight window.

Ten seconds is a long time. When
they shorten it to 7 or 5 in ten years you are going to wish you had exploited
this better. Call fast count and contact every time the mark tries to steal
your seconds or your space.

Throw into fouls.

When you are marking watch the
thrower’s grip. Very few people are quicker at changing grips than you will be
at shuffling your feet.

Contest foul calls if you were in
a legal position. Don’t touch the thrower after stall 6 unless he is about to
throw to somebody wide open.

Break side cuts are
under-utilized.

Getting the disc to the middle of
the field is the most valuable throw you can make in the red zone. Fake the upline
throw even if nobody is cutting there, the mark will jump.

Your fakes should look just like
your real throws except for one thing.

People like to exaggerate how
much a mark can take away of the field. A good mark will take away most of the
break side invert and will cause a swing to be at best parallel.

When marking your first step
after he throws the disc should be in front of him to stop him from burning you
on a throw and go.

Most people won’t chase you at
full speed while your teammate catches a warning-track huck.

Telling someone to be chilly with
the disc is stupid.

Telling someone to get it back on
D is stupid.

The last three feet around a disc
in the air belong to whomever wants them more.

A player with a 90% retention
rate has twice as many turnovers as a player with a 95% retention rate.

Don’t practice in the rain or the
wind, you will never have to play in those conditions.

Most marks don’t shut off the
break throw after you catch an incut.

Playing in an ultimate tournament
is actually going on a road trip with your friends to somewhere warm and sunny
and then playing sports with them against other groups of friends who think
they can beat you. Tournaments are the coolest part of ultimate.

Fantastic piece Jack. Even though I am unfortunately too spread out in terms of other commitments (work, fraternity, girlfriend, school out the ass) to put 100% into ultimate 95% of the time, but this definitely showed me a number of ways I can get better and help the team in my fifth year of playing next year.

One of the most well-written articles I've read. The only part I don't agree with is:"Don’t practice in the rain or the wind, you will never have to play in those conditions."

I have played in both of those conditions. While I agree that you don't need to practice in the pouring rain, throwing in the wind will make you one of the best throwers around. You really learn how to use the discs edge.